I was literally blown away with the picture from this HDTV. The blacks are the best I have ever seen, including from projectors costing into the six figure range. The ability to locally dim the backlighting makes a huge difference. This affects the color saturation, because previously, there was always some light leakage even in black parts of the picture (and there is a small amount of bias current in plasma HDTVs that produces faint light in black areas), but now, when one part of the scene is black, the LED groups in that area simply turn off. So, it is really black. I could see a halo effect when a black region was immediately adjacent to a very bright region, but this occurred rarely in movie scenes and TV programming, and also it was mostly apparent only if sitting far off to the side.

As to falloff, VIZIO has apparently changed the configuration of the LCD panel such that the falloff is mostly visible when you view the image from above the TV, so it is not so bad when sitting off-axis to the side.

In any case, especially after I calibrated it, the VF55 had the best high def picture I have ever seen. With the color not having light leaking through from the back to desaturate it, the images practically jumped off the screen. I actually prefer to watch movies on this TV than see them on my much larger projection screen (80") using a projector that does not have the incredible blacks that the VIZIO does. I am not sure how projectors are going to be able to compete with this, as the LEDs would have to be very small to fit in order to do locally dimming, and I am not sure how much light they would be able to emit that way. Maybe laser is the solution. Only time will tell.